November 7, 2017

Marketers will soon be able to send sponsored messages through Facebook Messenger, opening up more opportunities for brands to engage potential customers.

Advertisers will reach Messenger users based on Facebook’s targeting features — meaning only people who might be interested in your products will be targeted.

That does not mean anyone is reading people’s Messenger chats, however.

“These are biased things in the sense that if you have a lot of conversations in Messenger and in one of those conversations you said the word ‘banana,’ and then later on you see banana advertising and you are thinking that it’s somehow related, it’s not,” Facebook head of Messenger products Stan Chudnovsky told AdWeek.

“It’s just that every day you are having a lot of those conversations in Messenger and every day you are on Facebook and looking at the ads, at some point there is going to be an intersection of the two just statistically.”

The change also does not mean your Messenger inbox will be inundated with ads. Users will be able to choose how many sponsored messages they wish to see — even if that number is zero.